Can Charisma Be Taught?

If you want to be effective as manager, politician, parent or coach it helps to have a little bit of that X-factor leadership quality, charisma. In a previous blog I suggested that charisma is the oldest and most effective form of leadership because it is based on an intimate, personalized interaction style.

Charismatic leaders appeared in our ancestral environment whenever there was a need to quickly mobilize the masses for some common cause like a war or natural disaster. Through signaling their ability to unite a large crowd and motivate them to go the proverbial extra mile for their group, they obtain charismatic powers. Think Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.

This all seems a bit remote from the world of business and education but even there a little bit of charisma can go a long way. So do you have what it takes? If not don’t worry because you can train it. It seems there is nothing mysterious about charisma after all. Charismatic leadership can actually be taught. Recent research conducted by a team of scientists led by John Antonakis from the University Lausanne Business School, shows that training managers a specific set of charismatic leadership tactics improves their charisma, and thus, their effectiveness as leaders.

In a first study they randomly assigned a sample of managers from a large Swiss company to either a charismatic training course or no course. The training consisted of a lecture on the principles of charismatic leadership (including watching scenes from movies like Dead Poets Society), a presentation, and a feedback report. Both before the training and three months after, these managers were assessed by their co-workers (who did not know that their managers had received the charisma training).Their charisma significantly improved after the course.

In a second study the researchers videotaped the speeches of a group of MBA students before and after the charisma training, and these speeches were rated on charismatic content by independent assessors. Again, the training significantly improved the students’ charisma and perceived effectiveness as leaders.

So, what skills were being trained? The researchers came up with a long list of Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs). In case you want to develop your personal charisma, here are the most important CLTs and what I regard to be their primary function.

Charisma is perhaps the trait that I most desire. It can be used not just in leadership, but also seduction and all forms of interaction. The Art of Seduction actually lists “Charismatic” as one of the types of seducer (along with Coquette, Dandy, Siren, etc.). Can it be taught? Absolutely, just like a salesman teaches himself to act more extroverted when he’s truly an introvert and to flex his Myer-Briggs type to match his client’s to build rapport. Yes, this can start as a form of acting. But with continual improvement (kaizen), you can "fake it till you make it." ;)